The updated driver was successfully installed and appeared to work perfectly! Version 0.53 is ready for 3D support and makes use of the VRAM. A great improvement and boost in speed. It also helps that i have a Radeon HD 6570 card installed into my AmigaOne 500, which was a smart buy!
The third beta (a release-candidate) of TimberWolf (AmigaOS version of Mozilla FireFox) works really great under AmigaOS 4.1 Update 5 on my AmigaOne 500. Noticeable slower than OWB, but with full HTML5 support and with a lot of interesting features. TimberWolf is more than just a simple browser, but for the Amiga it's currently the most advanced browser available, hence the slow speed. This will change when AmigaOS 4.2 is released, which will have full 3D acceleration, among many things. For me, TimberWolf is quite useful for creating this blog! An add-on like FastestFox helps give TimberWolf a little speed boost.
AmiSystemRestore creates restore points just like seen in Windows, and is useful when some critical problems occur in the SYS partition after changes or updates. Instead of trying to format the SYS partition and bring back a backup of it from another partition, you can just use AmiSystemRestore to restore back to the last safe point before the problem! Very useful! This was installed into SYS:Utilities, keeping it in AmiDock's Utilities drawer when i want to run it, as well as in WBStartup preference to always run during startup. I'm sure such a restore system will be standard in future AmigaOS versions. Made a new backup so not everything is lost.
If you see the first screenshot here, you will notice that Jack is now fully working on my system. The issue with frozen buttons was solved by only choosing English language not just for Jack, but for Prefs:Locate, as AmigaOS doesn't yet have full catalogs for other languages than english, so now Jack is fully working, and i am very happy for that. Jack is really a great multi-tool application to show time, date, month, week, day, weather, you can edit your pictures in Jack and a lot more. Very useful and promising!
Sysmon is another useful tool i have installed into SYS:Utilities, and this was recently updated to a new version. Visually it appears much the same, but features an auto-refresh. It displays system information, it helps you to close the crashed program without having to reset your machine and stop the files that have stopped working, too! Very useful in case something happens.
YAM Mailer works as a charm, as for every 10 minutes, it lets the AmigaOS's new Notification system reply me a message of new mails when they appear, and i only need to click the message to display the new mails!
Love it when things work correctly!
As the title of the blog says, it hasn't just been work to do on my system, but also some pleasures in form of gaming. Seen on the screenshot below, i had just completed the excellent SDL platformer - BlobWars - Metal Blob Solid! An awesome game!
Apart from work and gaming, i have also had time to create some lovely instrumental music with the old, famous music tracker - OctaMED SoundStudio V1.03c. With TheMaestrix AHI tool, GUIGfx.library, Render.library and Reqtools.library among the things, this tracker does almost not crash at all. Works almost perfectly! The SM502 onboard audio of AmigaOne 500 (SAM460ex) is amazing, clear and beautiful! Really great audio, even if it relies heavily on the CPU for power.
Well, this completes yet another blog, so happy reading and enjoy the shots!
Written by:
Helge Kvalheim, Norway
